Race and Ethnicity in America by John Iceland

Author:John Iceland [Iceland, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Discrimination & Race Relations
ISBN: 9780520286900
Google: 77TIDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-02-14T00:48:55.407000+00:00

EXPLAINING PATTERNS OF WELL-BEING

There are a number of explanations as to why American Indians have lower levels of socioeconomic achievement than many other groups. While previous chapters evaluated competing explanations based on many quantitative assessments of the data, here I provide a more general—and less rigorous—review for American Indians. The fact is that studies of American Indian socioeconomic status are less common than those for other groups, in large part due to the data-quality issues discussed earlier.

There is little doubt that the discrimination and maltreatment of American Indian people and tribes by the white population and the federal government historically played an important role in explaining high levels of poverty among American Indians. American Indians continued to fare poorly even after World War II, when general standards of living of the American population were rising, and there were greater efforts to reduce poverty, such as in the form of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, launched in 1964. As researcher C. Matthew Snipp reports, “In the late 1960s, near the peak of the so-called War on Poverty, American Indians were one of the most disadvantaged groups in American society: the poorest, least educated, most unemployed, and unhealthiest. In 1969, one third of all American Indian families had incomes below the official poverty threshold, and this number was higher for reservation families.”46 This legacy of poverty undoubtedly has posed a long-term obstacle, given that individual achievement is affected by the resources of one’s family and community.

Discrimination likely continues to hamper American Indian economic mobility. Research using decennial census data indicates that American Indian men earn considerably less than white men, even when taking differences in education and other basic demographic factors (such age and marital status) into account.47 And while there have been some improvements in the socioeconomic status of American Indians over the past couple of decades, some of this can be explained by relatively advantaged individuals—in terms of education and income—who are more likely to report being American Indian than in the past.48 Multiracial American Indians have higher levels of educational attainment and earnings than single-race American Indians, though both of these groups lag behind non-Hispanic whites.49

In addition to discrimination and a legacy of poverty, low levels of educational attainment (human capital) limit the earnings of many American Indians. As shown in figure 16, only 14 percent of single-race American Indians aged twenty-five and over have received a bachelor’s degree or more, a figure that is the same as among Hispanics (which includes many foreign-born Hispanics with very low levels of education) and below that of other groups. Given the high returns to college education in our workforce today, this lack of education plays a significant role in explaining low earnings among American Indians.50 In part because of this, American Indians have relatively low employment rates too. For example, just 68 percent of American Indian men between the ages of twenty-five to fifty-four were employed in 2010, compared with 83 percent of white men. In addition, American Indian households are

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